French hacker admits smartphone app fraud

A 20 YEAR OLD French hacker has admitted to running a scam app that siphoned off small amounts of cash from smartphone users.

The unnamed man has appeared in a story published by the BBC that says he made over half a million Euros from his scheme. He reportedly was based at his parents' house in Northern France.

According to the BBC report he created free download apps that looked like other, more real and less likely to steal apps, encouraged people to download them and then extracted hidden micropayments from them.

The micropayments added up and he was able to secure ill-gotten gains of £405,000. We expect his parents will be upset, and not least of all because if he was earning that sort of money he probably could have moved out, got his own place and settled down with a girl or something.

The BBC reports that Android users were the most affected by the scam, adding that it worked by dialling up a premium rate phone line run by the hack happy bedroom tinkerer. As well as this he also took logins and passwords for gaming and gambling websites from his victims.

He claimed to have been motivated by a love of computers, if not their users, as opposed to greed. µ